Social Media a Strategy to Engage with your Audience

Social Media a Strategy to Engage with your Audience

This week I learned more than how important is for companies to be present in Social Media, I learned that there are many tools that help you build and manage a brand, that it is a way to communicate with your audience, to be heard and also learn about what people want. Social Media marketing is not just about advertising is about engaging with the community, and these are my main 3 take aways 

First of all, is really important to have a clear marketing strategy. A marketing strategy should have a clear target audience, clear measurable goals, brand personality and a brand story. Explained more in detail by Neil Patel and Ritika Puri on their paper The beginners guide to online marketing chapters 1 to 3. 

Then you have to identify the best social media platforms to reach your target audience, Specially for a small company it can be difficult to invest a large amount of resources to be active in a bunch of different platforms, therefore is important to select a few that can be maintained properly and constantly, Anna Fox, a blogger for getting things done and productivity, says It isn't Quantity is Quality, as she explain with more detail on this topic, a single well maintained profile is better than half a dozen mediocre ones. The trick is to find what social networks can provide the most benefits for your company. Then focus on crafting a well made, well maintained, active community through each one. Finding which networks will work best for you is really just a matter of taking a look at each one and integrating it into your campaign.

Finally, User-Generated content (UGC) is the holy grail of social media, it is all the information that users are posting, not necessarily to you or about your brand, but they are in fact telling what they want. Be able to catch useful information among the ocean of ideas generated by users is difficult but there are  Tools to Monitor Social Media Conversations. The other highly valuable aspect if UGC is to make users talk about your brand, it is like word of mouth but with a much greater impact.

Norondungo

Anabel from Offline 2 Online

This is the 1st week of MKT595 (Internet and Interactive Marketing) this is where my 1st blog gets its name.

I always wanted to believe that I'm not so out of touch on Internet topics, even I visit my Facebook page every couple of weeks, I did not have a twitter account until 4 days ago, I have never created a blog in my life, and use Internet mainly for work related topics,  I wanted to believe that it was not because I was getting obsolete I just  didn't have the time for "this".

Well, over the last days I have realized is not about having time to procrastinate on the Internet, is actually about connecting with the world, and using it to learn more, be more, feel more, enjoy more, share more, reach more, than what I can do if I'm an offline person.

This does not mean that I will become a twitter-FB-blogger freak now, but I have realized that the reason I used to not get more "online" is actually the same reason I now realize it makes sense. Because I don't have time to learn all I want to, be informed about all I want to, be in touch with all I want to, If  I learn how to make a smart use of Internet tools I can make a better use of my time, my experiences my resources even when I'm offline

It is a fact that the world is coming more and more  from offline to online, and I don't mean just people but also everything that surrounds us, our cars, alarm clocks, doors, garages, coffee machines. etc. this is called Internet of Things  and this means more and more information being generated and shared around the globe, information that will be used by many but will just create an advantage for those who really understand how to effectively structure and use this data.

I'm really happy to have started this journey to get from offline to online and within the next weeks I will be sharing the highlights of my learning on this topic and my experience on trying to catch up with Internet concepts and tools.

Anabel GB